


Liestar

by ForcedRedacted



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:47:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23315626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForcedRedacted/pseuds/ForcedRedacted
Kudos: 1





	1. From the Writer, with love

If you are reading this, then please understand. This is a baby. This is a concept and a dream all in one. 

Let's keep it a secret between us, hmm?

-FR


	2. Prologue

_How did you two meet?_

A wet shirt splatted over a dry rock. It was a rough thing, discoloured and patched in several places to cover the holes. The owner of the shirt crouched in the nearby stream, scrubbing their pants to try and get some of the more recent blood stains out of the legs. They were naked, as one tended to be when washing their only set of clothes, and took a moment to do a quick once-over of the terrain with slanted, pale blue eyes. They were set into a freckled face and partially hidden by a fringe of ash blond hair that was disturbed only by slightly pointed ears. 

The nose between and below the eyes was slightly pointed, in addition to being slightly crooked from a past break that never quite got set properly. Beneath that, a pair of thin lips. Beneath yet that, a body. 

It was a good, functional body, with hands and feet at the end of the appropriate extremities. A little scarred from the general wear and tear of handling things that generally tended to have sharp, pointy bits, but all the parts were there. The most notable feature was a scrawling tattoo that spread down from her nape to her tailbone. There was a pattern to it, if it was viewed all at once. A crowned, reptilian head nosed against the base of her skull, forelimbs clinging to her shoulders even as the wings spread down over her shoulder blades to her hips. The body of the beast was aligned with her spine, and the tail reached down to the lowest part of the tattoo and then curled upwards, weaving left and right under the hind legs and torso. It was filled with scrolling details that curled and gave the skeletal outline mass. 

It was not new, in that it was raw and red, but neither did it look old. None of it was faded, as vibrant and dark as it had been when she had woken to find it etched across her skin. She remembered that day. Sometimes, Keda-kai preferred not to. 

There was a lot of screaming. It was the first thing that she remembered, when she thought about it. Mostly her own, as the door to the summoning chamber was broken down as the Sentinels came for her. She wasn't supposed to -be- there, wasn't lawfully allowed even near the tower she had broken into, but the lure of power had been too great. It was a shit town, where she had been consigned to an average, boring life. She would never be as powerful a mage as the adventurer that had set up his home there. All she would have had to do to live a long life was keep her head down, obey the new laws and keep working as she was told. 

It was boring. Magic, was not. Keda-kai timed her larceny as best she could and got -lucky-. 

The mage had left to gather some reagents for the summoning of a great and terrible beast. She would have thought it was a demon of some kind, but that hadn't been the case at all. Instead, when she stumbled into the room and slammed the door shut behind her, trying to find a way to lock or bar it, there had been a diamond etched into the floor and marked at the corners with candles. They lit themselves as she had entered. 

It wasn't a circle, in her defense. All the stories said that summoning -circles- were dangerous. The door had come off it's hinges as one of the golems battered it down before she scurried back and crossed the threshold. 

Light had bloomed from the mark, startling her, prompting her to go from cursing to screaming before everything seemed to -stop-. The fist of a golem had halted a hand-span away from her. Words she didn't understand spread through her brain like wildfire and hurt just as much. Then, darkness. 

And light, once more, refracted off of beautiful glittering gemstones and twisting spires of natural quartz. She couldn't breath, and it was with hands clutching fearfully at her throat that she noted some of the gemstones -move-. Dimly, she remembered being asked a question to which she could only gasp and wheeze to try and answer before she was back in the tower. The fist came down, and pain had bloomed once more through her head. 

Keda-kai had come to in a cell, chained to a wall with drying blood matting her hair to her face and a hell of a headache. It had been the least of her worries, unfortunately. The mage staring at her, however... 

Well, it had been a long time ago, for her. The half-fey finished washing her pants, contemplating the question as she stretched the sodden fabric out over the nearby bank in an effort to dry them. Something shifted in the trees, and she glanced up at it and waved tiredly at the crystalline mass that unfolded from the forest and thumped it's way over to her. 

It matched the tattoo on her back, right down to the spiked crown of horns on it's brow. 

"The hatchling has killed something, Summoner. Shall we return to camp?"

"Sure. Let me grab my clothes." Keda-kai winced slightly as she stepped on a particularly sharp rock, and limped over to the monster bound to her with her effects over one arm. The front of the creature dipped downwards, one deceptive and diaphanous wing tipping out of the way so that the half-fey could climb up and settle on it's back. "He asked about how we met earlier today. Do you think he suspects that you're not a real dragon?"

"He is smarter than me. I would hope so."

* * *

Magic, where Keda-kai hailed from, was something rare and hard to control. The lucky were born with it, the rich studied how to use it and the _incredibly_ faithful were given it. The half-fey, despite her heritage... had none. (1)

Fortunately, people could use magic even if they lacked it. People could wield items with magic -in- them, and use their effects as their own. But that just wasn't the _same_. Items could be taken away. It was a stop-gap, a temporary measure, and nothing compared to being able to actually cast spells. This was where contracts came into play. 

Just as it could be given to the incredibly faithful, it could also be given to those who were not by beings who held enough inherent power. These were called Pacts, and there were two very different types of them. The first was the most common, demons, archfey or devils petitioned for their boon in exchange for souls, service or amusement. Not all who sought such a being lived to receive what they sought, but for every ten thousand who failed, one succeeded and came back stronger than before. The second wasn't much safer of a bet, and involved more a much more unwilling _binding_ on the behalf of the Other Party. 

Practitioners of this path were called Summoners. They did not beg. They did not plead. They _took_.

The manifestation of their magic was two-fold. A mark of some kind, and a physical creature formed of their imagination and empowered by the sliver of whatever great being they had torn free and returned with. This portion was often held hostage to prevent it's recovery, threatened with destruction. Sometimes though... 

Sometimes, before something could be taken, it was _given_. 

Once upon a time, a mage sought power. Not an uncommon tale, in and of itself. That mage was cursed by the gods for his hubris and greed, so that nothing he coveted would ever stay in his possession for very long. He sought power to break this curse, though every being he tried to form a Pact with refused and laughed at him. He turned to Summoning, because the power he sought would not be given. Instead, he sought to take. 

He did his research. The mage would require a being of greed, so that the curse could be fooled and attach to this new target instead of himself. For the greatest greed, he needed only to look to the dragons. From there, he narrowed it down. Something slow and lethargic, least likely to act and more likely to spend time trying to recuperate in the fabled dragon sleep. The search from there took him to the outer planes, and he found the entity he was searching for. 

It was gargantuan. Blending in with the quartz of the cavern around it, the dragon's smooth scales were an opalescent grey that refracted the light just as easily as the rest of the minerals around it. A crown of jagged translucent horns wreathed it's head, and the diaphanous wings were tucked down against the ground to appear as shimmering panes of prismatic glass that caught the light and bent it. The mage stole one of the shed scales and returned to his tower to prepare for the ritual. 

Gods do not _like_ to be cheated. This is known. 

The mage needed one final reagent. Somewhere in his tower, shortly after he left, a guard looked left instead of looking right. A very weak person, chased by the autonomous golems that served within the tower stumbled into the prepared ritual. 

When the great beast felt the tug on it's essence, it retaliated with pain. The ritual, while potent enough to tear at it, was not yet able to protect the one that triggered it. In the moment that a connection was forged between them, however, it realized that this was not the individual who could have begun such a thing. The pain went away, and it asked the little writing creature on the ground if it wanted to -live-. 

It did. The dragon nodded, and completed the ritual. The reagents involved with the initial casting were consumed, and the soft, fleshy thing was sent back with a sliver of it's essence. All of it's lair was packed up, before it shimmered and took a form long unused to find a new, more secure home. 

It would take time to recover the essence it had lost, but it had faith that it's little 'gift' would take care of the current problem long before then. 

* * *

(1)That was untrue. She had the _spark_ of it, just enough of her heritage mixing together to let her see a short distance into the dark. If she had been born without, this would have been a very different story indeed. 


End file.
